


I Like America & America Likes Me

by WhenIFindLoveAgain



Category: (여자)아이들 | (G)I-DLE
Genre: Character Study, Concerts, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Drugs, F/F, Falling In Love, Friendship/Love, Girls Kissing, Hidden Talents, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Inspired by Music, Love, Music, Musicians, Poetry, Poor Life Choices, Recreational Drug Use, References to Drugs, Romance, Slam Poetry, Slice of Life, Writers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-05
Updated: 2020-06-05
Packaged: 2021-03-03 22:34:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,485
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24553219
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WhenIFindLoveAgain/pseuds/WhenIFindLoveAgain
Summary: Minnie is a struggling writer living in New York City with her drug-using friend Soyeon when Soyeon launches her career but secretly reveals her girlfriend at a plant club whilst the world tells of how fake America is, and how fake life is
Relationships: Jeon Soyeon/Minnie Nicha Yontararak, Jeon Soyeon/Seo Soojin, Seo Soojin/Minnie Nicha Yontararak
Kudos: 7





	I Like America & America Likes Me

**Author's Note:**

> I've got a sister version of this coming up - Red Velvet. Check in on this and that, and tell me what you think :) hit me up on instagram at @theartoftootimingyou

"You just sit there writing stories that don't get you famous."   
Minnie was initially stung by Soyeon's words, but, in all honesty, there was no bite to them. They were just softly spoken on a sunny Winter afternoon. Minnie was in the sitting room of her inner-city New York home in her arm-chair with her feet up on a ottoman while Soyeon sat cross-legged and hunch-shouldered on the Danish rug across the light grey carpet. Soyeon was in 90's style boot-leg jeans with a tight black turtleneck and diamond earrings, her hair scooped up into a long pony-tail on the top of her scalp. She was smoking slowly, and a horrible out-of-focus but distantly melodic tune by Tiger-Lily Hutchence played in the background from Soyeon's phone; it was a track, "I Know What You Mean" from the EP titled, "Tragic Tiger's Sad Meltdown". 

"I'm trying my best."

"And you do write good stuff. Good shit." Soyeon granted Minnie. Minnie felt hopeless compared to Soyeon, his dipped half-lid eyes covered in beautiful strokes of strangely translucent and illuminate black and purple and lavender eye-shadow. Minnie was in a grey jersey cardigan, a navy long-sleeved top, and very, very cheap bootleg jeans from KMART that were too long in the leg by about two inches and had gotten wet when she had crossed a wet footpath when shopping at the supermarket earlier that morning. Soyeon's jeans were about two-hundred-and-fifty dollars, whereas, Minnie's were ten dollars. "But something has to go different." Soyeon hummed. She shifted over on her knees to where Minnie was. "Are you okay? You look sad." Soyeon rested her head on the ottoman by Minnie's legs and enhaled smoke across it's upholstery fabric.

"Why is it some dickhead whose brain is fucked with marijuana, their face is fucked with piercings, and their body is fucked with infertility - why is it they get a go and get to make money and become everything, and I'm just...." Minnie groaned, tilting her head back, gazing up at the ceiling. 

"Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I a liar? Fuck, I want to...see what I can do." Soyeon mumbled. Even though Soyeon was basically just mumbling and rambling along to herself, Minnie listened, Soyeon became a very raw person and a unconcious person when she smoked...which was all the time.

"What can you do?" Minnie asked her.

"Make a fucking problem for lots of other cunts..." Soyeon blinked slowly, raising the cigarette to her lips again.

Minnie giggled, covering her face with her hands. "You're so high on your drugs."

Soyeon hummed. "When I throw up, we can go out to the city. Let's go outside. To the city."

"Ok, you want some salt water?" Minnie asked. Once Soyeon smoked whatever it was precisely she smoked...it wasn't marijuana. It definitely wasn't marijuana. Minnie knew what marijuana smelt like, and Soyeon's cigarettes didn't even have a little bit of that in it. Soyeon said that the cigarettes came from Wales in the UK; they were made up of acorn and oak tree bark - the slim white translucently thin pieces beneath the rough skin - along with flower petals, bloom stems and about 10% of tar. Soyeon usually threw up after them, and, deep down inside Minnie, Minnie knew it was an absurd habit of Soyeon's. The cigarettes may have made her sick in the beginning, but they didn't now. When Soyeon had been half-drugged she had once murmured that "it gives me a flat stomach without the exercise". It made Minnie's skin shiver coldly and fearfully, but she never said anything. She constantly kept an eye on Soyeon, making sure she was ok. And, at the moment, Soyeon was.

Minnie slipped her headphones over her ears and played the 1975 as loud as she could without damaging her hearing so she could avoid hearing Soyeon choking and coughing and vomiting up the contents of her stomach - which was probably nothing more than tea and a piece of fruit - in the bathroom.

Ten minutes later, Soyeon came out into the sitting room. Minnie kept a spare toothbrush in her bathroom for Soyeon so she could do this. Soyeon slipped on her ankle boots with the cube-square heels and she grinned white teeth at Minnie, her dark red lipstick restored to perfection. "We're all scared of dying, it's fine..." Soyeon said, singing the last word - "fine" - ever so softly and for a few moments. Soyeon had came in that day wearing a world war two era flighter cap that had once been apart of a British RAF's pilots uniform; she put it back on her head and gathered up Minnie.

They went out to a British-style pub and stayed there for an hour. Soyeon mistook the door. The place she was looking for was at the end of the street...on the other side of the road. They got through a bottle of wine, and Minnie felt happy in Soyeon's company. "Thanks for not...getting that fringe." Soyeon told Minnie. "You look so nice without it. But, I guess I'd get used to you...with it, I guess, I don't know." They sat either side of a oak table in a dark-red leather upholstered booth; the leather was studded like a chesterfield sofa, and Minnie liked it.

"I thought I might grow it out down to my waist; another few inches." Minnie said. "What d'you think?"

Soyeon blinked at her hazily, but, then, a half-grin came across her pretty dark-red mouth. "Is that girl on fire?" She said, pointing a index finger at Minnie. Minnie made the mistake of looking around, and it made Soyeon laugh and clap. Minnie blinked when she realized Soyeon was talking about her. "You're skin is fire...so desired." Soyeon said, leaning back in her dark red leather booth seat, her eyes drooping close due to the intense gaze she focused on Minnie, gentling it. 

They went to the correct place Soyeon wanted down the street, Soyeon's elbow looped through Minnie's.

"When we get inside, you're going to write some of your best slam poetry, and then you're going to read it...or sing it out to everyone. How you do it, babe..." Soyeon mumbled on, barely coherent.

Minnie wrapped her left arm around Soyeon when they got a table inside the brand new club; the place was called "Earth", and, Minnie didn't know if she quite liked the people inside the place where fronds and ferns hung in hanging planters from the two storey ceiling-scape with was mottled with scars, paint marks, and broken up antique plaster cornices. A mess of 1930's stained glass lighting pieces and neo-modern Scandinavian metal cages of light hung from the ceiling and sat - dustily - on tables and even in odd places on the floor, stakced on small tables or books that people came and read and put back. They had a serving bar for alcohol, but Minnie wasn't sure about alcohol. For an hour, she wrote on and off while she talked to Soyeon and two bottles of wine came around that Minnie had no money to pay for, so, she hoped that Soyeon did.

When Minnie was done, not wanting to upset Soyeon in her current mood, she complied and told Soyeon that she had constructed a piece. But no way was Minnie singing it out or doing whatever Soyeon was deciding in her poor, drug-fucked brain.

"Oh, no way, you can't do this, sorry love, come on, let me, love." Soyeon said, grasping hold of Minnie's note-book after she had read it. Her upper lip was curled dismissevly, and there was something suddenly so toxic about her nature. Minnie wanted to hit her. "I know how to do this, you don't."

"You're a bitch, you know that, right?" Minnie growled a little bit. Soyeon left her side and went across the other side of waht could be described as the dining room - the place just seemed like to be one big restaurant dining space with this small stage tucked away in the corner of the room, surrounded by broken lamps with their stained broken glass and pot plants and cigarette ash. 

Soyeon got up onto the stage, one of her hands slid into the back pocket of her jeans, the other wrapped around the head of the microphone; she swayed to the side, and then to the other, before tilting her head to the side, observing everyone via half-closed lids. "I'm scared of dying, is that on fire?" She sang softly. "Am I liar? Ooo, I can't be quiet..."

Minnie's hands rose to her mouth, her being feeling stark and bare, something like a wetness filling up her being, a sadness, but, at the same time, it wasn't. Her eyes were locked on Soyeon. "I'm scared of dying; no gun required, ooo. My skin is fire, so desired..."

Minnie's eyes properly grew wet. She couldn't help herself. Everyone in the club was transfixed, direct on Soyeon. Soyeon hummed and vocalized lowly into the microphone, swaying her hips back the once, and moving the microphone on it's stand with her, dancing small and gracefully, every set of eyes following the lines of her body that looked utterly free and majestic. Soyeon's hands moved through her hair, her seven-decades old RAF hat falling to the ground and her hair been pulled from it's high-on pony-tail. "Is that designer? Is that on fire? Am I liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?" Soyeon suddenly sung in a human demand, her voice burred and lit on the edges and in the middle with paraell's still free, the naturalistic autotune but skill of her lungs and throat. Soyeon had a bit of a background in rapping, but all of that was no use here. This was something else. Soyeon's voice raised that little bit more. People in the street and through the walls next door could hear it, Minnie thought. "My skin is fire, it's so desired! No gun required! Oh, will this help me lay down? I'm scared of dying, it's fine..." Soyeon sung the last word, and people clapped, whooping and cheering, asking her to make sure she did "the whole thing". "What's a fiver -" Soyeon bobbed down to the ground in a crouch. "Being young in the city? Believe and say something." Everyone went mental, with Soyeon's elbow and forearm draped so delicately over her knee and thigh and the microphone stand bent down to her level. "Would you please listen?" Soyeon stood up, and moved across the stage, the music taking control of her body. "Would you please listen? We can see it's missing; when you bleed say so we know. Being young in the city, believe, and say something." Soyeon grinned like a lion.

"Would you please listen?" Soyeon pointed down to Minnie from the stage. "Would you please listen? We can see it's missing, when you bleed say so. We know, council, being listed, man I kinda miss it - hey!"

People danced, their bodies and their arms swaying and their hair flying; people filmed. So, so many people filmed. Minnie was becoming lost in it all, this scene that was more Soyeon's than it was her's. 

"Babe, go!" Someone shouted. Minnie turned around and for a split second to see a very round-faced girl with a immaculate figure in a black t-shirt, corset worn on the outside, denim shorts, fish-net stockings to her knees, and high-heeled Doc Marten boots with a black lace headscarf worn around her head and knotted in a rope at the back of her scalp by her neck; a peel of orange-brown finge came out from the hem over her forehead. The girl was beautiful. 

"I'm a designer, unite pariahs, am I a liar? Oh, will this help me lay down?" Soyeon moved to the ground onto her knees with a sway, and Minnie nearly lost her head as Soyeon continued to make her cheap slam poetry her own. "Kids don't want rifles -" Soyeon mimicked a gun-shot with a free hand. "They want supreme -" Soyeon mimicked a crown worn on her head. "No gun required -" Soyeon wiggled a finger at the crowd. What the fuck is in her cigarettes? Minnie thought. "Oh, will this help me lay down? We're scared of dying -" Soyeon pressed her hand over her heart, looking at Minnie. "It's fine!" Soyeon sang out powerfully and burred, before adding a growled "ooo, ooo!" on the end. She jumped on the stage and ran over to their table...before climbing over the top of Minnie, straddling her, and singing - or, rather, shouting song - down at her, their faces barely apart at all. The microphone, now free of its stand, was shoved between Soyeon and Minnie's mouths and noses. Soyeon's breath smelt like vomit and wine and toothpaste. It was disgusting. "What's a fiver been young in the city?" Soyeon ground down onto Minnie, once, twice, thrice times, waving an arm over their heads like a uniformed rapper. "Believe, and say something." Soyeon pressed a hard and momentary kiss to Minnie's cheek, before jumping off of her and rushing off, clambering back up onto the stage. The crowd knew the lyrics by now, and was singing along. 

"Would you please listen! Would you please listen!" Soyeon jutted her figner out to everyone, everyone under a spell, her spell, under her control. "We can see it's missing. When you bleed say so we know. Being young in the city; believe, and say something."

Soyeon signaled for quiet, raising a flat hand, then bring down towards the ground. "Don't have to say that, it's on fire. And where am I? So let, let me lie down." Soyeon sung softer, back down now by herself, but the crowd steadily joined back in. "My skin is fire, it's so desired. No gun required, oh, will it help me lay down?"

The girl with the round face edged her way through the crowd, and took a seat at Minnie and Soyeon's table. The girl tapped Minnie on the shoulder, and when Minnie looked around, the girl winked and smiled. "I'm scared of dying, it's fine!" Soyeon tore her hands viciously through her hair. "Oh, what's a fiver, being young in the city? Believe, and say something. And say something. And say something."

Soyeon gave one final whoop, and, it took a few moments for everyone to realize that it was all over. When they did, everyone applauded, and Minnie reflected at the enormity of just what Soyeon had just done. Roughly fifty people had filmed that, and would put that on social media, to be shared all around. Oh, God...Minnie could barely breathe as Soyeon made her way back to the table. But, then, in that, there was something else to tackle and get through now. 

The round-faced girl.

"Minnie, love, this is Soojin." Soyeon introduced the two of them.


End file.
